by Robert Nye
But what if the cunning little vixen intends to laugh at me? How? Why, by teaching her grandmother to suck eggs? The naughty wicked scamp, if so, thought I, kicking off the bedclothes in my fury. For I should have to show the wench that Pickleherring is no grandmother but the veriest grandfather under his red cotton nightshirt. And to achieve that office would I not need to take Anne across my knee, and have her drawers down, and attend to her posteriors …
These final images brought me terribly awake, and confronted by my own base desires with regard to the girl. Yet I knew at the same time, even in my excitement, that she did not deserve this, not after her kindnesses to me, which might well have been performed for no motive but that they are the natural expression of a good and simple heart.
I determined then that I would myself have to tread upon eggs in regard to the creature – taking care not to frighten, not to startle, never to hurt her, but to go tenderly and gingerly in all, as if walking over eggs that are so easily broken.
Pickleherring calmed himself down from this unfortunate storm of passion by recalling the well-known anecdote of the silent man and the eggs. (This story, now I come to recite it for you, chimes with some of my procedures in this book – where there is often a delay between event and resolution, for no better reason than that being the way my comedian of a mind has always worked.)
The anecdote concerns as I say a man much given to long silences. One day, when riding over a bridge, this man turned about and asked his servant if he liked eggs, to which the servant briefly answered, ‘Yes, sir.’ Whereupon not a word more was spoken until a year later, when, riding over the same bridge, the man turned about to his servant once more, and said, ‘How?’ To which the instant answer came: ‘Poached, sir.’
This fine example of intermission of discourse served me last night to take my mind off the matter in hand. I must then have fallen asleep, for the next thing I know I was watching a wonderful silver egg being laid by the joint labour of several serpents in the street below, and then buoyed up into the air above London by their hissing. I stepped out of my window and I caught the egg, and I rode off through the night at full speed astride it. I knew that I had to ride fast away from the serpents, to avoid being stung to death. But I knew also that now I possessed the egg I was sure to prevail in my Life of Mr Shakespeare, and indeed to defeat all my enemies in any contest or combat that might befall me, and to be courted by King Charles and others in power. In my dream I then heard Anne’s voice saying (as it seemed close by, and whispering, upon my pillow): ‘Pliny says he has seen an egg just like ours, but it was only about the same size as an apple.’
Then I dreamt I wept, and woke. But why I wept, I knew not; yet I know.
Chapter Sixty-Two
About Mr Richard Field: another ruminating gentleman
When William Shakespeare first came to London he lodged for some while at the sign of the White Greyhound in Paul’s Churchyard. This place was not a tavern but a building that housed a printing works. It was owned by a friend who had been his fellow at the Stratford Grammar School, a young man by the name of Richard Field.
Richard Field was an enterprising gentleman. Son of a Stratford tanner, he had got himself apprenticed to a London printer when he was eighteen years old. His second master was a Huguenot, Thomas Vautrollier, famous in his day for the beauty of his types and the excellence of his press-work. When Vautrollier died, young Dick married his widow, a Frenchwoman called Jacqueline. Thus, at an early age, he came into possession of one of the best printing establishments in England.
The house of Vautrollier had published some fine if heretical books. For example, the works of Calvin, and Luther and Theodore de Bèze. For example, the works of Giordano Bruno. For example, new editions of Ovid and Plutarch. For example, Campo di Fiore or Singing in four languages to aid those who wish to learn Latin, French and English, but especially Italian. (I have this.) For example, that Treatise on Melancholy, by Dr Timothy Bright, which I have told you was of use to Mr Shakespeare when he was writing his Hamlet.
Under Field’s control, the printing house became if anything even more distinguished. Having published Puttenham’s important The Art of English Poesie, it went on to publish Mr Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, as well as Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in the translation made by Sir John Harington at Queen Elizabeth’s request. But all this is to run ahead a bit too fast. I just want to show you that our hero had a knack of falling on his feet even when starting out in a strange city.
At the time when Mr Shakespeare came to London, as it turned out, his old school-friend had just married the merry Jacqueline. She was a sportive piece, a black-eyed beauty. It cannot have taken much pity on Mr Field’s part to bed her or to wed her, especially since it was only by inheritance or marriage that any newcomer could enter the close corporation of master-printers. The Fields’ house was at the south end of an acre known as Little Britain – the printers’ quarter. This meant that Mr Shakespeare had not far to go to do his first job of horse-holding at the theatres on the north side.
Later in life, Dick Field had an even better shop, the Splayed Eagle, in Wood Street, Cheapside, where his widow carried on the business after his death. It was in the back room of that establishment, over a dish of strawberries, that I once asked this engimatic woman who she thought the Dark Lady of the sonnets might have been. She smiled into her fan. ‘C’est moi,’ she said.
Field’s printer’s device (inherited, like the dark Jacqueline, from old Vautrollier) was an anchor surrounded by laurels and accompanied by the motto ANCHORA SPEI.
His other claim to fame, apart from his friendship with Shakespeare, is that like the Reverend Bretchgirdle, Mr Richard Field was a ruminating gentleman.
This human chewing of the cud is not so singular a thing as you might suppose, dear reader. Dr Walter Warner told me once that he had just had the satisfaction of dissecting a ruminant man, and proving the falseness of Bartholin’s theory that such people possess double stomachs. So neither are they freaks in their anatomy.
Richard Field the master printer used to commence ruminating about a quarter of an hour after a meal, and the process usually occupied him for an hour and a half, being attended with greater gratification than the first mastication, after which he claimed the food lay heavy in his lower throat. He was obliged to retire from the dining table at his house beside the printing works, and to go into a little room, star-ceilinged, which he called his ‘rumination chamber’, where he could ruminate away to his heart’s content. Often he declared in my hearing that this second process of mastication was ‘sweeter than honey’ and ‘accompanied with a delightful relish’. His son by Jacqueline inherited the same faculty, but with him it was under better control, he being able to defer its exercise until any convenient opportunity, and so needing no star chamber for the purpose.
Mr Field seldom made any breakfast in his later days. He generally dined about noon or one o’clock, eating heartily and quickly, and without much chewing. He never drank with his dinner, but afterwards he would sink a pint of such malt liquor as he could get. As I say, he usually went into his ‘rumination chamber’ and began his second chewing about fifteen minutes later, when he would claim that each and every morsel came up successively, sweeter and sweeter to the taste. Sometimes a gobbet might prove offensive and crude, in which case Richard Field would spit it out. The chewing continued usually about an hour or more. If he was interrupted in the act by a customer he found (alas) that he would be sick at stomach, and troubled with the heart burn, and foul breath. He could punctuate his second eating of the same meal by smoking a pipe of tobacco, and this was never to my knowledge attended by any ill consequences. It was not until a few weeks before his death, in 1624, that the faculty left him, and then poor Richard Field remained in tortures till the end.
I think it must have been one of the few sorrows of Mr Field’s life that he parted with the copyrights of Shakespeare’s narrative poems to a book
seller called Harrison. Both poems were extremely successful and went through many editions. Perhaps Field let them go because of his theological interests and because by then Mr S was getting big in the theatre. Field had no time at all for the world of the playhouse. He joined other residents of Blackfriars in signing a petition in 1596 – the year I came to London – against James Burbage’s attempt to open a theatre there. The petition succeeded. I think that setback broke old Burbage’s heart.
Chapter Sixty-Three
About a great reckoning in a little room
I can never hear what they say but they haunt my mind’s eye.
Look, there, as in a dumb-show, there are four of them. Four men come to a reckoning in a little room. Over and over, they act out for your delight the terrible scene. You always want it to be different, but each time the end is the same. The dagger thrust in the eye, the skull hacked open. Blood on the walls and the ceiling, the poet lying dead in a pool of his own hot blood on the floor.
From the start, from the moment when they meet together, you can see that two of these four men are ruffians, and one is not. It is none of these three, however, that you can’t look away from. The fourth man, the victim, he is the natural magnet for your gaze. It is not just his sombre velvet doublet, his gold lace. It is not even that glittering ring hanging from his left ear, nor the gold buttons that seem far beyond his station. Neither is it, exactly, his sensual face, nor his dangerous smile. This is Christopher Marlowe, who is more than the sum of his parts. You can’t take your eyes off a man like this.
The day has been hot. The place is a tavern in Deptford, three miles out of London, on the bank of the Thames. It’s a low inn, and dirty, the house of a widow called Bull. There’s a garden at the back of it, unkempt, full of thrusting May blossom, that runs down to the throbbing vein of the sunlit river.
These men met here this morning. All day they have been drinking and talking, and walking in the garden. They dined, too, at noon. Marlowe and the two ruffians have laughed a good deal – for the most part, you might think, at nothing. The third man, the gentleman, he does not laugh. His name is Robert Poley. He’s a government agent. He sits still in his cloak, hands folded, his face in the shadows, while the others fool about. You will have noticed that he drinks much less than they do. You may also have noticed that the ruffians provide Mr Marlowe with two drinks for every one of their own.
Now it is six o’clock, and the cool of the May evening has begun, and bats flap to the eaves, and all four men have come back into the tavern. Their glasses refilled, they retire to a little private room.
What causes their quarrel? We shall never know. Something that eyes cannot see, perhaps. Three of these men are liars, and the truth-teller soon lies dead.
Christopher Marlowe, poet and playwright, is stabbed through the right eye, quickly, by Ingram Frizer, in this small room in Deptford, after what seems to be a sudden quarrel over the bill or ‘reckoning’ presented for their food and drink. At the inquest, Frizer will claim Marlowe first attacked him, for no reason that he could guess, and unprovoked. He pleads he only killed the poet in self-defence. His fellow ruffian, one Nicholas Skeres, supports this story. Frizer will be acquitted by royal pardon.
What part Poley played I can never determine. I know only that there were those in high places who wanted Marlowe dead, and if he really died by chance as the result of a blow struck in a tavern brawl over who should pay the bill then it was certainly convenient for the Privy Council, before whom he was due to appear to answer charges of atheism and blasphemy.
As Marlowe wrote himself: Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight. Only it was not so much cut, my dears, as hacked to bits.
The son of a cobbler, he was just the two months older than William Shakespeare. His was a restless spirit, of an over-reaching ambition. Ben Jonson praised him for his ‘mighty line’. You can hear this at its mightiest in Tamburlaine, the play of his which had the most success. The Lord Admiral’s company first performed it in that same summer that Mr Shakespeare came to London, and I know that the newcomer stood three times among the groundlings to be intoxicated by its thundrous verbal music – he told me so himself. Marlowe fired both Will’s fancy and his ambition. He said that hearing Marlowe opened his ears. He said that Tamburlaine was like Herod of the Coventry play made intelligent. He said that Marlowe, single-handed, had dragged the verse of the play-makers out of antiquity, and matched it to the sound of the speaking human voice, and made it modern and alive along every line.
He got to know the man, too, and I believe they were friends, despite deep differences of temper and of temperament. I believe that Marlowe may have helped Mr Shakespeare in the charting of the three King Henry VI plays, and that you can see some influence of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta in the opening scenes of Shakespeare’s Richard III.
That, though, is about the extent of it. There are those who suggest that if Marlowe had not been snuffed out in the blaze of his youth, then he would have gone on to be Shakespeare’s equal. I cannot agree. Marlowe is all fine lines that stop the play – which may be poetry, but it is not drama. Also, Marlowe’s scenes are brilliant, but they do not connect or cohere.
Michael Drayton once wrote of him: His raptures were / All air and fire. Which is true. But unlike Mr S he had not eaten of the earth and found it sweet. Nor had he any gift for comedy, in which Shakespeare is rich. Marlowe would have been incapable of creating a Falstaff. Look at the clown scenes in his Faustus; there’s not a real laugh to be had. Some say Marlowe didn’t write them, I know, that they were extemporised by the actors in the first place. If so, that’s because he dared not even try in such a vein.
I say that Shakespeare and Marlowe were very different as men, and so they were. The epithet most often applied to Mr Shakespeare by his friends was that he was ‘gentle’. No one would ever have dreamt of describing Marlowe thus. He was headlong, he was violent, he was like a little Lucifer. ‘Intemperate and of a cruel heart,’ said his friend and fellow lodger Thomas Kyd, but then poor Kyd was on the rack when he said that, as when he blurted out several of those ‘monstrous opinions’ which made Marlowe’s name so hated by those in authority. There were supposed to be three sheets of paper which the cobbler’s son had written denying the deity of Jesus Christ our Saviour – though if anyone ever read them, then I never met him. Then there was that report that he called John the disciple ‘Christ’s Alexis’, meaning that Jesus had loved the man unnaturally just because he said of him that John was the disciple he loved best. In this, of course, Marlowe was simply attributing to Jesus his own predilections, as revealed on that other notorious occasion when he declared that ‘all that love not tobacco and boys are fools’. His principal heresies, assembled, seem to be these:
That all Protestants are hypocritical asses;
That the woman of Samaria and her sister were whores, and that Christ had known them carnally;
That the archangel Gabriel, by his salutation to the Virgin Mary, was bawd to the Holy Ghost;
That all the Apostles were fishermen and base fellows, neither of wit nor worth, and that he could have written the Gospels better himself.
These are bold sayings. They are also rather silly. I think that Marlowe, had he lived, would have outgrown such schoolboy blasphemy. I think also that had Marlowe learnt to believe it might have provided him with some release from the bondage of his intellectual pride. However, someone, in some high place – (and not God, I think) – decreed Marlowe should not have the chance to grow or to learn at all. Hence that dagger-thrust which penetrated his skull, making a wound of the depth of two inches and of the width of one inch, just above the right eye. He was twenty-nine years old when they cut him down.
They say, some say, that Marlowe died blaspheming. I never heard him. When I watch that dumb show in the little theatre of my head I see nothing that makes me think that he dies blaspheming. Consider, it can only have been his murderers who ever claimed he did any such thing, and why
should we believe them?
To be professed an atheist while bearing the name of Christopher must be an extraordinary burden.
Mr Shakespeare always spoke of Christopher Marlowe with tender affection. True, he was never like Ben Jonson, who put down his contemporaries. But Marlowe he went out of his way to praise. In his play of As You Like It he also pays his murdered friend the compliment of several backward glances, as when he had me (as Rosalind) mention how Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club, yet ‘did what he could to die before’. (That was Marlowe to the life, as I have heard, a fire-eater who no one could ever have mistaken for a cud-chewer.) In the same play, Phoebe the shepherdess quotes directly from Marlowe’s poem Hero and Leander when she invokes the dead poet on Mr Shakespeare’s behalf:
Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might:
‘Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’
And then Touchstone, to cap it all, recalls Marlowe’s death by Frizer’s dagger over the ‘reckoning’ in that Deptford tavern, when he says to Audrey: ‘When a man’s verses cannot be understood … it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.’ That last allusion is the one that always brings tears to my eyes whenever I hear it. It is the more effective for being double: Mr Shakespeare means us to remember not only Marlowe’s death, but one of his mightiest lines, from The Jew of Malta, where he speaks of ‘Infinite riches in a little room’.
I have often wished I had met Mr Christopher Marlowe. He was surely the best of those spirits they called the Bohemians, the play-makers who flourished between 1580 and 1590, the group which included George Peele and Thomas Nashe, and even (to be charitable) Robert Greene. Their plays were a great jumble of good and bad, a reflection in this of their own irregular lives. But at least they began that process which Shakespeare perfected. In their writing you see them start to take the ordinary common words and set them down in such a way that the verse sparkles and laughs at you, or then is sad and makes you want to cry. Before William Shakespeare, none of them did it better than Christopher Marlowe.
